Reading Response 2 - Dara Hou

September 15, 2013

“The archetype of all humans, their ideal image, is the computer, once it has liberated itself from its creator, man. The computer is the essence of the human being. In the computer, man reaches his completion.” This quote was stated by a novelist and dramatist, also known as an advocate of epic theatre (britannica.com). The quote is very much relevant to The Nature of Beast because it is a metaphor of the topics being discussed in the article. The quote itself not only tells the importance of computer systems to the humans but also how humans’ ideal character are also based off of computers. Similarly, one of the main topics from this article touch based on human interaction with computer, how “the person has to have some idea about what the computer expects and can handle, and the computer has to incorporate some information about what the person’s goals and behaviors are likely to be” (Laurel 13). All in all, the interactions between man and computer is extremely imperative, since one need to recognize another in order to successfully interact each other with full understanding.

The term  interface has been brought up quite often throughout the article. The whole point of this concept is “so that they [human-computer interfaces] offer means for establishing common ground..” (Laurel 4). The goal is for the computer to learn something that is alike of those human face to face conversations, so that it smooth-en out the interactions between computer and human. It was fairly challenging to make this work because it’s not just the idea of making the computer understand human, and vise versa;  it is rather what they have in common that makes it easier to recognize each other. It wasn’t long until interface metaphors emerged which is another concept to help figure the idea of common ground out. Because interface metaphors have not shown successful progress, the new focus was shifted to a comparison between interface design, and psychology and graphic design.

Speaking of  the graphic design, the author explained how closely human-computer interaction can relate to the everyday life of a graphic designer. While human uses computer, they do not realize how relevant the concept is to graphic design. To clarify this similarity, the author uses one concrete example stating that “both create representations of objects and environments that provide a context for action” (Laurel 9). Many more examples were given but the purpose is to convey the readers that graphic design relate to human-computer interaction more than we, as humans, think. 
From my understanding of this article, I am against the idea of the whole human-computer interactions because it is enough that we use the system for our own benefits; it is unnecessary to program the computer to interact with us in our own ways. Of course it is important to make them have a better interaction with one another, but it’s just not crucial to do so. Afterall, it is just a system that humans design for their own use.